In Spike Jonze’s Oscar-nominated, futuristic film “Her,” computers compose music, carry on seamless conversations with humans, organize emails instantaneously, and even fall in love. But what appears to be pure sci-fi has more grounding in actual science than the casual viewer might believe.

Stephen Wolfram, whose Wolfram Alpha drives the artificial intelligence-like component of Siri on the iPhone, thinks that an operating system like Samantha as depicted in the film is not only possible, the technology behind it isn’t that far off. “The mechanics of getting the AI to work—I don’t think that’s the most challenging part,” he said in an interview with Speakeasy. “The challenging part is, in a sense: Define the meaningful product.”

Whether that means a companionship machine or a personal assistant device, the resulting interface will hinge on its purpose—rather than a general AI with no objective. “We will have better personal assistant-systems quite soon that read our email and can tell us things about it,” said Wolfram. “Realistically what’s going to happen is it’s going to be this nice information presentation of the different emails, and a stack of ones that are about this, and a stack of ones that are about that.” Indeed, services like SaneBox and even Gmail’s filtering tabs have already moved in that direction.

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